This article presents a critical review of 112 works of research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in higher education. It focuses on ways previous scholarship framed AAPIs in higher education, and specifically on how those works engaged in a sustained project of countering the model minority myth (MMM). Many publications on AAPIs in higher education mentioned the MMM and neglected to account for the original purpose of the MMM—to maintain anti-Black racism and White supremacy. We identified four key and interconnected limitations implicit in the counter-MMM framework that result from a lack of a critical recognition of the model minority as an instrument to maintain White dominance. Our analysis suggests that the well-established counter-MMM scholarly project is fundamentally flawed in its ability to humanistically reframe and advance research on AAPIs. Therefore, we call for a reframing of research on AAPIs in higher education.
Despite their popular portrayal as high achieving and structurally incorporated, race continues to shape the career choices of Asian American college students. As second-generation Americans, Asian Americans negotiate a constellation of factors when deciding their career choices, most notably, pressures from immigrant parents, awareness of labor market discrimination, fear of being tokenized in particular occupational fields, and influences from peer networks. These findings help elucidate how race and the social context of immigrant adaptation can affect the occupational trajectories of Asian Americans and other children of immigrants in the United States, regardless of their educational achievement and socioeconomic status.
This chapter explores how Asian American students engage in leadership and activism through student narratives, a review of literature on leadership and activism as forms of student engagement among Asian American students, and the presentation of a conceptual model for understanding Asian American students' engagement in leadership and activism. The multidimensional model describes the relationship between leadership and activism at the intersection of students' awareness of systemic and social structures, their actions for social change, and their racial and ethnic identities. We also discuss recommendations for student affairs practitioners and suggestions for Asian American student leaders and activists.
Utilizing a critical raceclass theory of education, OiYan A. Poon and colleagues analyze interviews with Asian Americans who have publicly advocated for or against affirmative action and acknowledged how their understandings of racial capitalism informed their perspectives and actions. Limited research has considered Asian American subjectivity in examining what shapes their diverse perspectives on affirmative action. This study adds to research on the racial politics of the debate, which has increasingly centered Asian Americans and their interests, and introduces a multidimensional model of raceclass frames representing different political perspectives and choices around affirmative action: abstract liberalism, ethnocentric nationalism, conscious compromise, and systemic transformation. The model offers insights on Asian American frames and ideologies of racism, capitalism, and education to account for their divergent political perspectives and choices in the affirmative action debate.
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